“Partly as a result of my terrible dream, I have been thinking that the landscape of the intricate world that I have painted is inaccurate and lopsided. It is too optimistic. For the notion of the infinite variety and detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance. But all this leaves something vital out of the picture. It is not one pine I see, but a thousand. I myself am not one, but legion. And we are all going to die.” (Dillard 163)
In “Fecundity” Annie
Dillard dwells on the horrific and alienating aspects of ‘Nature’ and in doing
so she prefigures Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology. The episode is
sparked when, after a big flood, a “terrible yellow plant” is unearthed,
“fleshy and featureless” (161). This tells you the this chapter won’t be about
flowers, but about roots, and fungus, and everything else that grows in the
dark, moist corners of our gardens. Dillard’s focus on luna moths and their
“horrible animal vigor” is also telling, as moths may be considered the ‘goth’
equivalent of butterflies. This is certainly the vocabulary Morton would use,
for whom dark ecology is “embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over
death, or a sadistic Bambification of sentient beings, but in a ‘goth’
assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay
with a dying world” (Morton, Ecology Without Nature 185). Fecundity is essentially
about Dillard learning to reckon with this desire, while she explores what
Morton would call the “strange strangers” that make up the “mesh.”
“The more you know
about the origins of the First World War, the more ambiguous your conclusions
become. You find yourself unable to point to a single independent event […] The
more we know about life forms, the more we recognize our connection with them
and the stranger they become” (Morton, The Ecological Thought 17). Dillard illustrates
exactly what this means in her account of the lives of several insects – whose
“ordained paths” are nothing less than “preposterous” (174). The more Dillard
tracks the stages of their lives – from hatchling to sexual maturity – the more
it feels like the stars need to align in order for these creatures to even
stand a chance, and the more mystifying they become. It’s comical, as well as
wasteful. Nature is anything but
efficient.
Dillard’s approach
consists of a series of thought experiments, in which she asks you to inhabit a
number of strange strangers: “You are an
ichneumon,” “you are the manager of the Southern Railroad,” you are the
horsehair worm (172, 177, 174). And yet she steers clear of anthropomorphism,
which for Morton is also an issue. He explains that what is important to dark
ecology is “Loving the thing as thing, not as a person in disguise, […] on the
condition that we preserve the artificiality [or monstrosity] of the other and
do not try to naturalize or collapse otherness” (Morton, Ecology Without Nature 196).
In other words making presumptions about the inner world of a parasite is futile and misguided. All you can do is
respect their utter opacity while sustaining an attitude of radical openness –
which manifests in the refusal to look away. Towards the start of the chapter
Dillard’s acknowledged that she “brought it upon [her]self, this slither, this
swarm” by looking at the two luna moths mating; “By watching them I in effect
permitted their mating to take place and so committed myself to accepting the
consequences – all because [she] wanted to see what would happen. [She] wanted
in on a secret” (162).
The secret is that the
‘Nature’ is meaningless, and ugly, and that it doesn’t care about humans.
“Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me” (178). It is characterized
not by design, but by automated processes, “a mindless stutter” whose mindlessness
is exactly what terrifies. By dwelling on this Dillard is making strides into
one of the “three direction for ecological art [which] emphasizes automated
processes such as evolution” (Morton, The Ecological Thought 105).
Laura op de Beke
Works Cited
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim on Tinker Creek. Canterbury Press 2011.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature. Harvard University Press, 2012.
